It runs into 10's of thousands of dollars for big shows (of which there are always more than one in a year). You can easily burn 200k a year on this kind of stuff. I don't' blame ASUS playing it safe in a tough market. A big splash doesn't necessarily gain any sales/marketing advantage.

but then you wouldn't care as a consumer and not a person balancing a budget.

to this. I don't care how much it costs to run a booth at CES. At least put a human being in it to answer questions. Just throwing a tiny box up there with a few motherboards is not the caliber of presence we've come to expect from ASUS.

Furthermore: We, as a collective, spend thousands and thousands of dollars on ASUS equipment in a year. Hell, I'm sitting here with hundreds of dollars of my own ASUS equipment right now. In 2010, they had product managers, the freaking head of design over from Germany in the booth to talk to the press and enthusiasts, and several new product segments to display.

You guys can whine all you want, but this display was pathetic, especially considering what a phenomenal product the Transformer Prime is. NVIDIA was showing at least six Transformer Primes in various software and application demos in their booth. Where was ASUS?

They're not poor. They know (and don't insult our intelligence, we damn well know as well) how important CES is. They just dropped the ball on this one and dropped the chance to impress.

Since when is Icrontic called out for being snarky and willing to show how sad something is? Jeez guys, have you all grown up and gotten tight pants on?

Our son is to young to attend the CES show. He asked us to find Asus and take photos of there booth, and ask some questions " which he wrote down " we couldn't find for a bit, because we where not looking for a very small unmaned booth. When we did find there booth we where convinced it was a distributor not the real Asus display. So we keep looking, but after consaulting a map we soon learned indeed it was a bust. We went back to the space to take a better look to find still no one there.I have had better looking lemon aid stands as a kid than this booth. One disappointed kid!!

As mentioned on twitter. This is a shitty article, fact free, value free, stupid article. -snip-

You're certainly entitled to your opinion. The only fact to report was the lack of presence. If you look at the full sized picture all you will see are parts. No spec sheets, no information to be found, not even product names. Just some show floor maps someone decided to leave behind.

Look, I understand that it's not cheap to have a presence at CES. But this was a half-assed effort. If it was me making the decision and I had only enough funds to throw a static display up without a single person to answer questions, I'd have skipped the whole thing. If you're going to do it, do it right. Otherwise don't bother.

My team and I went to CES to check out Android tablets with the specific aim of comparing the Transformer Prime, Galaxy tabs, Panasonic ToughTab, and Motorola's offerings. And the only one we couldn't get a hands-on test with was the ASUS. We had to go to NVIDIA's already uber-crowded booth to try and see it, but most were behind glass for demos. We searched everywhere for a place we could try it but were unable to ever touch one. I had high hopes ASUS would have another fantastic display like they did in the past where we could talk to their design team and/or B2B marketers to discuss how their tablet would work with our business. We searched all the exhibit halls and never saw their big booth. The one they had (in the article's photos) was tucked in a back row behind a wall, and even if we'd have found it there would have been nobody there to work with us and answer our questions. My goal of purchasing 200 initial units was dashed because we're gonna go with something we've tested - the Galaxy tab. Sorry ASUS. You didn't get our business this year.

What a collossal waste of space this display was. They should have stayed home and saved the space for a company that cared enough to actually show up for their supporters. I had questions on the prime and it wasnt even n their pitiful display!

I am the deputy editor of the British men's technology magazine T3. Asus were in the Trump hotel at CES this year. They had an entire floor hired out, with different suites for different product lines, and I had a one-on-one run through of their entire range for the next year, and very impressed I was too - from the MeMo to the Prime HD to the Padfone to their Zenbooks to their hardcore gaming PCs. Clearly this wasn't communicated as effectively as it could be, if the above photo is anything to go on, but it was a nice antidote to the ridiculously hectic CES shop floor and presumably if you'd made an appointment, as is very much recommended at CES, you would have seen it all too

I am the deputy editor of the British men's technology magazine T3. Asus were in the Trump hotel at CES this year. They had an entire floor hired out, with different suites for different product lines, and I had a one-on-one run through of their entire range for the next year, and very impressed I was too - from the MeMo to the Prime HD to the Padfone to their Zenbooks to their hardcore gaming PCs. Clearly this wasn't communicated as effectively as it could be, if the above photo is anything to go on, but it was a nice antidote to the ridiculously hectic CES shop floor and presumably if you'd made an appointment, as is very much recommended at CES, you would have seen it all too

Thanks for the update. We had plenty of off-site appointments with other companies, probably more than ones on the regular show floor. Looks like ASUS's PR folks didn't communicate this one very well. I would have loved to meet up with them to see the new stuff. Maybe next year.

They would have been better off putting put sign in their booth: "Hey, we're in the Trump hotel! Come visit us!"

I disagree. The purpose of hotel space is to provide a more secluded, intimate setting free from the chaos and interruptions that come with booth space. The difference between the two environments is huge. On the show floor, any number of people will cause minor disturbances, usually limited to accidentally bumping into you (it's quite crowded). A select group of assholes (sadly, often members of the press) will attempt to hijack your meeting with their own questions, disregarding the fact that you are in a conversation (IGN is particularly well known for doing this at E3). By moving to a hotel suite, the likelihood of either of these situations arising is limited...mostly because it's out of the way and their location is not known unless you are in contact with that company's PR folks (which is why we weren't aware of the ASUS presence).